Saturday February 9, 2019

I find calming and centering Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlin Aurelia Smith’s use of Buchla synthesizers on one of my favorite LPs of recent years, their FRKWYS record, Sunergy (2016).

(Best heard, BTW, in a darkened room while watching a muted version of this Joshua Light Show video. I find the experience of pairing the two thrillingly synesthetic.) Drone, darkness, repetition, primordial shapes, sketches, free improvisations, print-based consciousness supplanted by multi-sensory “happenings” — together, these form a potent combination. Birds fly near and perch beside me. Above I hear the roar of a plane. What I long for, though, is an alteration of the fundamentals of experience, like my sense of time and space. Out of the meltdown of consensus reality comes a voice like Whitman’s shouting, “Cheer up, slaves, and horrify foreign despots.” But perhaps reality also wants us to hear Seneca the Younger, to whom my initial response is wonder at the dude’s disdain for a figure akin to Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (In his critique of the followers of Epicurus, Seneca writes that the situation is like that of “a sturdy man dressed in women’s clothes: your decency remains unimpaired, your virility unharmed, your person is free from any degrading submission, but in your hand is a tambourine.”) Let’s see: according to Dylanologists, the bearer of the tambourine is the Singer’s Muse. And the Singer’s Muse is one’s inner voice, is it not? The one that counsels “If you’re currently uncertain whether you’re located outside or inside the Gates of Eden, then stay home and ‘let virtue lead the way.'” When faced with this voice, the question is always, “Who are we? Are we already in accord? Are we already centered? If not, then who does the letting, who the leading? Who gets to be the shadow after whom the Other is always chasing?” Lucky for us, a card is a card, a hand a hand. It is in our moderation that we horrify despots.